What Should We Do With All These #@$@& Empty WaMu Branches?

WaMu went on an insane building spree in Chicago a few years ago, and when combined with Chase, already a huge player in the Chicago market, it became obvious that there are just too many damn bank branches. Chase recently announced that it would close almost 300 WaMu locations nationwide — 57 of them in the Chicago-area alone. The bank branches replaced local businesses during the boom, but will they come back during the bust?

Chicago-blog Hyde Park Progress takes a look at a building on Chicago’s South Side that was recently renovated and turned into a WaMu, which, of course, is now closing.

Now we have a landlord at 1364 E. 53rd who had a bank tenant paying $32/square foot and now has nothing; had he kept the paying tenants cut loose in 2005, he would be in a better position. Instead, he signed with a financial institution that has gone down as the biggest bankruptcy in US history, which has caused the credit markets to freeze up, and a recession to accelerate, all of which make it highly unlikely that he will find a new tenant for the space vacated by the bank that drove the businesses out to begin with.